‘It’s Elitist’: Frontier CEO Pushes Back on Claims Ultra-Low-Cost Will Fail

Frontier Airlines CEO Barry Biffle sought to defend ultra-low-cost airlines, taking swipes at United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, who has been a staunch critic of the business model.

“If he’s good at math, he would understand we have an oversupply issue in the United States,” Biffle said at the Skift Global Forum in New York on Wednesday. “This is Economics 101, maybe he took math and not economics.”

Biffle was responding to earlier comments by Kirby that the ultra-low-cost model is dying in the U.S. At an industry event in Long Beach, California on September 11, the United CEO said he expected Spirit to go out of business because he’s “good at math.”

Biffle also described some of Kirby’s past comments on ultra-low-cost carriers as “elitist.”

“That's like the CEO of Nordstrom saying, ‘I allow customers to buy jeans from Walmart.’ Like, I mean, this is absurd,” he said.

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